There Is No Year - Blake Butler [1]
The father felt too warm in this small room. He put his left arm around the mother, felt uncomfortable, took it back. He tried resting the arm on his knee or on his belly—still not right.
What if he could remove the arm, the father wondered? If he could remove the arm, he’d do it. This was the arm the father used most often to take his son or wife at certain soft times by his or her own arm, or other times to masturbate himself or eat.
The mother wrung her hands and flexed her neck and saw the ceiling. There was something about the ceiling. She hummed a song—a certain song—she thought she was making it up but she wasn’t.
The father stood up.
The father sat down.
The father picked up the controller for the TV. He held it parallel to the floor. He turned to a channel that came in slanted. He turned to a channel that was not there. He mashed many other buttons, angry. The buttons’ digits formed a certain sequence. The father turned the remote toward his head.
He pressed OFF. He pressed OFF. He pressed ON. He pressed OFF. He pressed MUTE. He pressed OFF. He pressed OFF.
ESTATE
The father had bought the house with paper money. He’d worked for years and years. If asked he could not say for certain what the work was. Mostly all he did all day any day was look into a blank screen flush with light. Sometimes the father looked at porn or ads or sports scores, but mostly just the light.
In the nights before the new house, the father walked up streets peeping through glass. He’d seen the light in other houses. He’d seen people in their beds—sometimes moving in the darkness to the bathroom or the stairs. He’d seen so many bodies fuck. In one house he’d seen someone reading about a father at the window in a book. All the houses touched by wire. The grain in the glass in the windows in the frames in the walls in the rooms in the houses on the yards along the streets aligned for miles.
The father wanted a certain kind of life to give his family. He wanted a house described by all of who he’d been—though who he’d been, to him, would not stop changing.
The father washed and washed his hair. He tried. He concentrated.
He had not asked the mother or son what she or he thought before he signed the family name on legal lines. He could not remember where he’d found the listing. He could not remember what he did not remember—nor would he want to, would he ever.
There were many things the father did without his wife’s permission—things like seeing, walking, aging—things he could not name.
From outside the new house looked like many other houses.
COPY FAMILY
When the family came to live inside the new house, they’d found another family already there. An exact copy of their family—a copy father, mother, and son. The copy family members stood each in a room alone unblinking. The copy family would not speak when spoken into—though they had heartbeats, they were breathing. Their copy eyes were wet and stretched with strain. Their copy skin felt like our skin. Their copy hearts beat at their chests.
The father flicked the copy father on the arm there by the window in the kitchen—the window where on so many coming days the father would look out onto the yard—the yard where once the copy family had surely moved and laughed and dug and thought and fought and seen the sky change color. The father watched the copy father flinch. The copy father’s big ring finger had thirteen copy rings on. In the copy father’s copy eyes the father could read his other’s current scrolling copy thoughts:
This is my house.
This is our house.
This is where I am.
WHAT ELSE COULD THEY HAVE DONE?
The family took the copy family and they set them on the back porch. The father carried the copy father and the mother the copy mother and the son his. The skins of the two families smushed together grunting. Their sweat became commingled. The copy family members